Legend and folklore to the contrary, not all our “founding fathers” were saints who came down from Heaven to help transform America into the land of the free and the home of the brave where its leaders were all instantly identifiable as fair, just, and honorable. Our electoral system is a case in point. It reeks of dishonesty and racism. It was originally slanted toward wealthy land owners, aka slave owners. The wealthy slave owners wanted lots of extra weight to their votes because slaves could not read, write, or vote legally, hence their “landlords” would take care of that nuisance activity for them. For perspective and according to Wikipedia, 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Since those early days this system has been heavily slanted toward the will of the ultra wealthy.
A few pretenders to intelligent thinking have argued that the United States is not a Democracy, rather it is a Constitutional Republic, thus concluding that citizens have no right to a direct voice in how the country is run. Put another way, this point of view suggests that representatives are much smarter than the rest of us, and their votes should carry more weight than ours. Forget about it.
The two terms are not mutually exclusive. A republic is concerned with form (separation of powers for example), while a democracy is concerned with citizens having the right to critique and to change their government. I like the definition that a republic is a system of government that allows a country to be democratic. That usually stumps the pretenders, and wins the argument.
Our electoral system is subject to many forms of manipulation; a direct vote of the people is not. Using the wisdom implicit in Occam’s Razor, alone, points us to the wisdom in adopting the simpler of the two. A presidential vote in which one candidate receives 78 million votes, and second place receives 73 million votes ends there. There is very little wiggle room for the losing candidate to protest. In contrast, our electoral system relies on the votes from 50 different states with 50 different sets of rules. Therein lies the rub. The many different rules and how they are construed and aggregated is fertile grounds for lawyers to seek and find lifelong careers. They are also very costly to contest or to defend, they are subject to manipulation from wealthy backers (see Citizens United), and they are an endless source of joy for those who love gerrymandering (i.e., manipulating voting districts so as to cram many poor democrats into a small number of districts while creating many sparsely populated districts for republicans). That is why all the states from Idaho to the Dakotas, down to Texas and points eastward are red.
Many new organizations are now in existence to unravel the stranglehold the wealthy and their legislative puppets have over the electoral system. The fact that Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes, yet lost the electoral vote 306 to 232 is a recent outcome. A mere 55,000 vote total in 5 states was enough to swing the outcome from Clinton to Trump. Biden’s recent win was in reality very thin by this sausage grinder system. A mere 76,000 votes could have changed the electoral winner to Trump despite Biden’s 5.3 million popular vote count superiority.
A Solution. There is at least one organization (actblue.com) with a great work ethic and enough stamina to bring about the needed changes. But they need money to continue working to abolish the electoral college and allow each state to send in a slate of electors committed to voting for the winner of the popular vote. They currently are 72 percent of the way to victory. They need our support. Click on the above link and send them a donation to end the current abomination, and restore honesty and freedom into our presidential election system for the first time. You will love yourself for it!
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